Hernani. Victor Hugo
spirit did in 1830. About this powerful, enthusiastic man and his cultivated young wife, in their simple home, there gathered a number of literary men and women, who were called the cenacle or symposium. They, with other persons whom their influence touched, had a common tendency, which in the case of some was clearly enough defined to be called a common conscious purpose. The German poet Heine was living in Paris at that time, and we know very well what object he set before his eyes. Matthew Arnold, in his fine essay on Heinrich Heine, quotes the great singer's own words, and makes them the text of an illuminating criticism. They represent exactly the sentiment of Hugo and his friends at that time. Hear them: «I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a sword: for I was a brave soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.»
If you have read any of the so-called comédies et proverbes of Alfred de Musset, as «Fantasio» and «On ne badine pas avec l'amour», you must have felt how those short recitals of passion are breathed through and through with the spirit of revolt against conventional opinion; how high they stand above whatever is commonplace; how little they derive their pulsating interest from what is usual and accepted. You know how it is when you listen to an orator who employs false methods of exciting the emotions: how he drops his voice at the end of certain phrases; how he whines through certain cadences; how he tries his battery of anecdotes; how he grows warm at the conclusion, and sits down amid a hush and thrill, very likely, leaving in shallow minds the impression that he has made an effective appeal. Yet to the discriminating listener it is instantly apparent that he has been merely following the conventional method, and very possibly has not meant a word of what he said; and when a simpler, freer man gets up and talks sensibly and calmly you see wherein the vice of conventionality lies. It is in deceiving the performer himself and corrupting his power to judge himself or form a critical estimate of what he is doing. The result is that he fails to observe that he is doing nothing original. And so he goes on feeding us with husks of commonplace. Now, every generation demands, and would, if it were untrammelled by convention, produce, its own interpretation of the phenomena of life. The radicals of our fathers' time are conservatives for us, and we ourselves, however vigorous our protest against present oppressions, shall in our old age be considered so much detritus, to be got rid of by the hot young builders of that day. So the Romanticists of 1830, being soldiers in the war of liberation of humanity, were the deadly enemies of what is commonplace, of what is conventional; were radicals in politics, in religion, and in their aesthetics. One of the most interesting subjects for historical investigation is the development of aesthetic theories. And of all periods when art theories have undergone great changes, this period of 1830 in France is one of the most interesting.
They hoped, these brilliant enthusiasts, to bring about a new French Revolution, bloodless, of the spirit rather than of the form. Here are their names: Lamartine (for he had gone over to the Romanticists), Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Beranger, Alfred de Vigny, Balzac, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Sainte-Beuve. You perceive that although the original revolt was against the dramatic fetters imposed by Racine and Boileau and Voltaire, the revolution had extended over the whole range of literature – against conventionality in criticism, in lyric poetry, in fiction; just as the revolt of the American colonies soon got far beyond the original grievance about the tax on tea. Their common tendency was protest against conventionality. They went too far under this impulse. Alfred de Musset, for instance, translated liberty into libertinism, and marred the innocent bloom of his art by the licentiousness of his life. Victor Hugo, the devout, God-fearing youth, became a sentimentalist and skeptic; a poet could not do worse, and the effect is seen in a marked diminution of creative force. He no longer possessed his old earnestness, and thus his work of this period fails to touch our hearts with fire. The self-consciousness of youth, instead of melting into that ever-present recognition of the Divine which is the true culture of a mature man, only stiffened into an odious self-conceit, which is Victor Hugo's ugliest blemish. George Sand advocated and practised free-love. Béranger, the Robert Burns of France (but not nearly so great a poet), overdid his office of convivial songster, and one pities him and dreads the effect of his influence. Dumas' private life was a long scandal, saved from ignominy only by the contrast between its ludicrousness and his genius. His lack of restraint affected his work too, for had he possessed more restraint he would have written fewer books, and they might all have been as good as «Les Trois Mousquetaires».
Alfred de Vigny is a beautiful exception. Although he followed Victor Hugo with all the ardor of his chivalrous nature, he preserved at the same time a measure, a moderation, a grace, a consistency, which the coldest Classicist might have envied. He was born in 1799, of a family of soldiers, and tells us he learned war at the wounded knees of his warrior father. In his early life he was constantly laying down the pen for the sword. While in garrison at Paris he was to be found chiefly in the libraries, and it was in camp, in the Pyrenees, that he wrote his celebrated historical novel, «Cinq Mars». I have already mentioned his fine translation of «Othello», which met with such strange and undeserved disaster in 1829. He cultivated English literature assiduously, and drew inspiration from Milton – and Ossian. The rhapsodies of the pseudo-Ossian were causing a great stir throughout Europe, and were eagerly read and applied by the Romanticists as a proof of what could be done in defiance of the rules of Boileau. Alfred de Vigny, too, like almost every novelist from that day to this, was profoundly influenced by Walter Scott. He fortified his position with several other plays, of which the best known is «Chatterton». But the works from his hand which our generation reads most are «Cinq Mars» and his lyric poems.
Alfred de Musset was a poet of such great importance that it is impossible to say, in a brief sketch like this, anything at all adequate about his delicate qualities of heart and mind, his strange, sad life, his wonderful achievements, and his growing fame. He will live perhaps when all his contemporaries are forgotten, except Hugo. Hugo himself has no other rival so dangerous.
Of Balzac, George Sand, and Dumas it is hardly necessary to speak in this connection: being novelists, they have the advantage of being read – which is not always the case with poets. The development of the novel has been the only concerted movement of great importance in French literature since the early days of Romanticism. From Balzac, the father of the realists, Hugo, the extreme of idealists, learned little. There seems to be absolutely no artistic relation between them. George Sand and Dumas were, of course, idealists, romantic to the last degree, and although Hugo in his novels manifestly strains after reality, he is much more in line with them than with Balzac. But Hugo is not a novelist at all in the sense that Balzac or George Sand or Dumas are novelists. He has written certain prose works of imagination, entitled «Les Misérables», «Les Travailleurs de la Mer», «Notre Dame de Paris», and so forth, but the matter in each case is essentially poetical, and it seems to me that the language is neither that of prose nor that of verse.
There remains one other member of the cénacle who is not so well known that mention of him here would seem superfluous, and who yet had much influence over Hugo. Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) was one of the greatest literary critics the world has known – perhaps the greatest. At the age of twenty-four he published his «Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au seizième siècle», a work of deep maturity, showing a marvellous grasp of fact and a spirit of rare discrimination. Some men seem born with literary taste. There are boys of ten who appreciate poetry better than most educated men of forty, and can tell you the reasons, more or less correctly, for their opinions. The end and aim of all literary education should be to create and foster this faculty of apprehension and discrimination. Some come by it naturally. For others it can only be the result of large and varied reading and considerable experience in affairs, and of a culture of the heart. To Sainte-Beuve it was given in abundant measure at an early age, and he strengthened it by assiduous labor. No other language can boast a body of criticism at all comparable with his «Causeries du Lundi» and «Nouveaux Lundis». In English we prize jealously, as things unparalleled in our language and precious beyond expression for their rare beauty and usefulness, the literary criticisms of Matthew Arnold. Imagine a Matthew Arnold without prejudices, without hobbies, without mannerisms, who should give us a complete body of criticism covering the whole range of English